[Cialug] Adventures in ROS

[Todd Pierce]

Crew,

So, I got ROS more or less working, but anybody who is going to try this
has to remember that their stuff is not all nice and packaged (or working)
like they say it is.

All I wanted to use it for was as a message passing infrastructure with a
good solid Lisp integration. I´m glad I had no other expectations.  The
latest release (Kinetic) doesn´t look like it was tested on Ubuntu 16.04
and most components are not even available in installable (pkg or source)
form yet.

After the Desktop Full installation failed due to missing files in the
cloud, I did the minimal Desktop installation which failed for the same
reason.  Then I did the Bare Bones installation.  That worked, but that
meant installing anything else from source, since nothing else had package
installations available for Kinetic yet.  Even source installation didn´t
work for nearly every component so I removed ROS and tried the minimal
Desktop installation again, which worked (probably because I had a leftover
environment at that point).

At this point, a few weeks had gone by and they actually had a package
installation of ROSLisp_repl available that didn´t crash.  That installed
everything I needed to do development.  The tutorials even worked.

This does not mean you´re out of the woods with ROS if you want to try it.
You see, it seems anything beyond what I installed requires ROSJava to be
installed first.  There is no package for that available for Kinetic and I
have not found any installation process from source that works.  It appears
it has been spun off as a project of its own, which is fine, if it were not
required (with a specific configuration) by a bunch of other things during
installation.  That´s a developing drama I can report on later.

So, not that anybody cared, but I just thought I would mention that if
someone were building robots.

-Todd